


Half Sick of Shadows

by gallifreyburning



Category: Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Time War, War Doctor spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-10-13 19:48:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17494190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: Frontline reports said Leela had been killed in battle at the Pillars of Consequence, fighting the Daleks in the Time War. During a chance encounter on a backwater planet, Narvin discovers that this version of events isn't quite accurate.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story springs from "War Doctor 4.2: Lady of Obsidian," where Leela gives the Doctor an account of what happened to her at the Pillars of Consequence, and describes an encounter she had with an unnamed Time Lord some while after that. If you want full context, I included a transcript of her conversation with the Doctor [in the last chapter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17494190/chapters/41205194#workskin). Also, as with many of my Gallifrey fics, my conversations with [alyona11](http://alyona11.tumblr.com) helped coalesce several story details. And if you want to blame anyone for putting Narvin in prison, in this particular instance it's her fault.

Less than a span after he steps foot on Delmark Twelve, Narvin ends up in prison. 

At first he tried to reason logically with the Delmarkians, and then he asked politely, and finally he shouted a bit. None of these approaches motivated them to open his cell, so he finally sat down on the concrete floor, in a corner, to consider his options.

This planet doesn’t have the technological sophistication to defend itself from the Daleks in the Time War, but they are advanced enough to know they should confiscate his staser and tools before locking him up. This discrepancy is exactly the reason he came: Delmark Twelve has landed on Gallifrey's lengthy list of planets that potentially merit protection during hostilities, because they are fractionally important to the web of time, but aren't advanced enough to have any significant planetary defenses.

After Narvin and Romana's rebellion against Rassilon, and their subsequent arrest, she was locked up and he was summarily drafted into the military. Mantus no doubt found it amusing, assigning him to scouting detail. In theory the position makes sense: his CIA experience means he’s left Gallifrey before, unlike the majority of Time Lords, and he has a vague notion of how to conduct himself among aliens. But in practicality, Mantus has ensured that Narvin scouts the most hopeless backwater planets in the universe, alone, his only mode of transportation a decrepit ship without a scrap of time travel technology. Narvin hacked his ship's inadequate security protocols within thirty microspans of leaving Gallifrey, and the only reason he didn't immediately return to help Romana is because she ordered him not to. Not yet, at least. He loathes the fact that she’s on her own, playing her long game against Rassilon on the other side of the universe. But until he has a compelling reason to disobey her orders, he’ll bide his time and play his role, according to her plan. 

Narvin has learned from his last twenty-seven scouting missions that it doesn’t matter what he discovers here on Delmark Twelve, or what his recommendations for its protection, this system is so marginal that the High Council will inevitably decline to intervene when the Daleks appear. These people are doomed, probably sooner rather than later. He feels the itch of impending disaster in the back of his mind, vibrating down this timeline like a spider stalking down her web.

He’s locked in prison in this metropolitan Delmarkian city, while these aliens contact a chieftain or mayor or whatever local authority to come deal with him. If he only had purple skin or eyestalks shaped like butterfly antennae, he might have convinced them he’s native and talked his way out of here. (Well realistically, probably not. Blending in with aliens has never been his strong suit. But he’d give it an awkward, disastrous go, at least.)

This cell is stark but efficient, with a short, oval-shaped solid metal door designed to accommodate the petite Delmarkian species. A single porthole is situated at the top of the door, currently sealed with another solid piece of metal. Inside the cell, a pipe extends from one wall, water beading at the end of it like a drinking straw. If only he had a properly-shaped Delmarkian probiscus, he could sip from it. In the corner hangs a cocoon-like sling, for resting or sleeping. After an ill-fated attempt to sit in it, Narvin resigns himself to the cold, and not particularly clean, concrete floors.

A few spans after his arrest, they bring him food. He assumes it’s food, at least, a glob of orange gelatin shoved through the porthole by purple hands.

“You must let me out! I’m here on behalf of Gallifrey’s High Council of Time Lords! I’ve come to prevent an apocalypse, but how can I possibly do my job when I'm locked up in here?” Honestly, he won’t be able to stop it from happening even if he’s out, but at least he might get to his ship or even save a few Delmarkian people, before the end.

Narvin isn’t expert at reading the facial expressions of insectoid creatures, but the guard seems distinctly unimpressed when he name-drops Gallifrey, the Time Lords, and the High Council. Dumping the gelatin inside the cell, where it hits the dirty concrete with a squelch, he slams the porthole shut. Narvin attempts to leap away from the goopy splatter, but ends up with it all over his boots and trouser hem, anyway.

It smells like flowers, sickeningly sweet. He coughs once, accidentally sucking in a big gulp of air, and ends up in a coughing fit that leaves him hunched over and holding his knees. The more he coughs, the more revoltingly floral air he inhales, the harder he coughs next time.

This new, miserable pastime keeps him occupied for seven whole microspans, until he just stops trying to breathe altogether for a while. After that, he’s back to sitting on the sticky floor, and calculating various uses for the sling, the pipe, and the two bulbous glowing orbs on the ceiling that must be connected to an electrical circuit, and how he might engineer these things into some kind of escape mechanism.

Just as he’s pulled the sling from its hook in the ceiling and picked apart a few seams, the porthole snaps open again. A set of purple eyestalks poke into the cell. Caught red-handed with the mangled sling, he stares back in exasperation from his position on the floor. “Listen, either leave me alone long enough to engineer my way out of here, or release me. The second option would be most beneficial for everyone involved - well, except the Daleks. Their baseline level of grumpiness is high enough to begin with, but if they find out you've got a Time Lord stashed away when they arrive, they'll be even more irritated than usual.”

“We brought another for you,” the Delmarkian warbles in his sing-song tongue, ignoring every one of Narvin's very reasonable, logical points.

“I don’t want any more of your plant jelly,” Narvin replies, using all of his self-control to suppress an eye-roll. “But I’ll take my tool set, if you’re passing out freebies. I’d even settle for a knife, at this point.”

“He is here,” the guard trills.

Narvin pauses at that, rising to his feet. “He, who? Have you finally brought someone in authority, to discuss the gravity of your planet’s situation?” It dawns on Narvin that the guard wasn’t speaking _to_ him, but _of_ him, to someone else in the corridor.

“Let me see him, then, since you summoned me all this way,” the other person says, and both of Narvin’s hearts clench into such absolute stillness, he’s sure he’s having a bi-cardiac event.

He knows that voice.

After the catastrophic incident at the Pillars of Consequence, he was convinced he’d never hear it again. Leela had died on that battlefield – he read the reports, and saw battle footage of her disintegration from the combat-cams, because Romana had smuggled him a copy, even in the midst of her own dire situation on Gallifrey. A while later he had hacked into the APC Net and pulled up pre-war data records so he could look at her again – but seeing her like that was almost worse, the memories of better times painfully lush against the stark reality of the Time War. He hasn't repeated that mistake since.

Narvin’s first attempt to speak fails spectacularly, a breath wheezing from his chest. More than anything he’s ever needed in all his lives, he needs to hear the voice again. He sees himself slamming into the door, clawing his way through the stone walls until his fingers are bloody stumps, doing anything necessary to reach _that voice_.

It occurs to him, after an eternity condensed into a millispan, that he’s not slamming or clawing anything; he’s standing stock still in the middle of the cell, mouth gaping like a fish. The purple guard vanishes from the porthole, and a humanoid face appears.

Not just humanoid, but human.

Not just human, but _the_ human.

“Leela!” he manages, although it comes out as a gasp instead of the earth-shaking shout it ought to be. Because the ground _is_ shaking, trembling beneath his feet as though the foundations of reality have collapsed. Even as the universe crumbles, his brain helpfully supplies him with the number .000000000023 percent, which is the exact probability that this specific, insanely unlikely scenario would occur. Leela shouldn’t be here, and yet she looks exactly as he remembers, aside from shorter hair and makeshift insectoid clothes. She might be an hallucination, or an artificial construct, or a tool of psychic manipulation employed by the Delmarkians. But she has to be flesh and blood, because dense chronon distortion surrounds her like a pea-soup fog, and his time-sense is howling like a siren. She’s real, and his authentic Leela, and she’s profoundly anomalous. 

“Oh,” she says, squinting and frowning at him. She retreats from the porthole, backing up until she bumps into the opposite wall of the corridor.

Narvin’s legs have turned to water, quivering and soft, but he stumbles forward and stoops down to seize the edge of the porthole with both hands. Jelly squelches under his boots, his heels slipping in the surprisingly greasy substance.

“Leela, praise Omega! It’s you! It’s really you!” He’s too shocked to weep, too overcome to manage anything particularly articulate or charming. He needs to lay hands on her, to touch her and verify his time-sense’s certainty that she’s real. He needs to kiss her, and finally – properly – tell her how important she is. More than anything, he has to get her off this planet before the Daleks come. “Please, Leela, open the door!”

“No. I cannot – he cannot – no! Not him!” She closes her eyes, turning her head away, so her auburn hair shields him from view. Her body quivers in an odd way, and he realizes that she’s retching, as if the sight of him has made her sick. She gestures to the Delmarkian guard. “I cannot speak with – _hurph -_ I cannot look at him!”

And with that, she leans over and vomits.

Another Delmarkian in the corridor, not wearing a guardsman’s uniform, rushes to help Leela. Someone else slams the porthole door shut, smashing Narvin's fingers with the hefty metal. 

“Fuck!” he shouts, in pain and shock as he yanks his hands inside the cell and the porthole lock snaps. The slippery jelly combines with his backward momentum and sends him sprawling onto the floor, but a split-second later he's back at the door, on his knees with his ear pressed to the metal. Outside, he can still hear Leela heaving, and the concerned humming of the Delmarkians around her. His fingers tingle in the early stages of acute pain, those moments before the nerve endings collect themselves from the trauma they’ve just experienced and start shrieking at him about what an idiot he is. Before the pain coalesces, he bangs the door with his palms.

“Leela! Please, tell them to open the door! _Please_ , Leela!”

The last two words hang in the air, shrill and desperate, as the door vibrates under his palms. Eventually he stops punching the metal and grows quiet, listening. The corridor outside is silent, and his overwhelming sense of standing in the presence of a temporal anomaly has faded into nothing. 

Leela is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

Leela knows too many things. She knows so much, in fact, that it feels like she knows nothing at all. One day she woke up on this planet among these gentle people, with no idea how she had gotten here, and could offer them nothing in exchange for their kindness, not even her name. This is because she has twenty-one different names, all of which belong to her, but she does not know which one is true.

Even as she has spent the last year drowning in uncertainty, treading water in the midst of too much, she knows one absolute truth: she is no coward. In the face of pain, and fear, and even panic, she does not retreat. If there is a worthy fight, she will rush in without hesitation. As her Delmarkian family ushers her out of the prison building, while she’s still stumbling and retching and dizzy, she decides that she will return later to confront this man in the cell. (Not a man? Something else? She roots around in the overlapping shards of her memory for the right word, but the effort makes her head spin, and so she stops. He shall be simply a man, then.)

The Delmarkians who found him had taken one look at him, tall and wingless and without eyestalks, and assumed that he belonged to her. Alien visitors were not unheard of on Delmark, and so his appearance did not cause panic. But months ago when Leela arrived, she came unarmed, unclothed, and as weak as a newborn babe; this man was different, he came with weapons and a ship. So they locked him away for safe-keeping, and sent a message to the family who took her in, and asked her to make the journey to look at this other lost creature – perhaps as lost as she is.

“Tell us what to do with him, since he is one of yours,” the Magistrate had said, when she arrived.

Seeing him the first time was … unpleasant. As if the very sight of him took the shards of her shattered memories and pieced them together, like a puzzle, but into the wrong shape, so the edges didn’t line up properly. Not to mention the nausea, and panic, and general sense of misery she felt at the sight of him.

 _Leela_ , he had called her. Over and over again, in an increasingly distraught tone. Everything else about him might have been wrong, but that single shard didn’t feel mismatched or misplaced.

That evening, when her illness has passed and she has settled into temporary city lodgings with her adopted family, she tells them, “I remember now. My name is Leela.”

The youngest, still in her caterpillar stage, wraps her dozens of sticky feet around Leela’s arm and nuzzles her shoulder. “I will still call you Lady Red-Wing.”

“I will answer to it always, young one,” Leela laughs, stroking her soft setae.

After they fall asleep, Leela climbs out of her cocoon sling and walks through the darkened streets, returning to the prison alone.

“He shouted for quite a while after you left,” the guard-captain trills at her, shaking his head. “He seemed very angry. But he has grown quiet.”

“I would like to speak to him alone,” she says.

“The Magistrate says your speech must be supervised. But I will stay here, at my post, where I can hear but he cannot see me, so he will speak freely to you,” he replies, wings flitting against his back in excitement.

“Very well,” she says. A moment later, she stands outside the cell, staring at the closed porthole and collecting her nerve. As she has pondered the idea of this man, trying in vain to sift through the mountain of conflicting memories about thousands upon thousands of people she has known and loved and killed, she has come to realize that he is familiar.

She knows him, and she does not know him. He has always been a stranger, or perhaps he was her husband. She knows for certain that she stabbed him through both hearts the second time they met (two hearts? yes, two hearts, she decides); she also knows for certain that she bore him three daughters. He is her mortal enemy and she has killed him half a dozen times in a half dozen different ways; he has only killed her thrice. He has a scar on his shoulder that she created with her blade – in love and in hatred and in something in between, all at once. He should be wearing a different face, he should be a woman, he should only ever be exactly like he is now, with short hair and piercing grey-blue eyes.

In every contradictory truth, one thing is absolute: she cannot remember his name, any more than she remembered her own before he spoke it aloud.

From the other side of the door, he knocks. Not the same frantic battering as last time, but gently, begging permission instead of demanding. “I know you’re out there, Leela. I can sense you.”

His voice makes her fingertips tingle, a painful sensation, and she squeezes her hands into fists to keep them from shaking. Pulling in a deep breath, she unlatches the porthole and slides it open.

Stooping down, he peers out at her, and the sight of his face makes her feel like she’s seasick in a hurricane on a wild ocean. Her eyes slide past him to the rest of his cell; he’s decimated the few scant contents. Wiring hangs from the light fixtures in the ceiling, the water pipe has been bent and broken, and his sleep-sling is a pile of knotted, tattered shreds on the floor. Order exists in this chaos, though, as if each act of vandalism served a purpose, building toward an end goal of some kind.

“You’re drowning in chronon disruption, so much I can practically see it,” he says, like a physician delivering a diagnosis. “It hurts?”

“‘Chronon disruption.’ Those words mean nothing,” she replies, crossing her arms, her back hitting the opposite wall of the corridor as she unconsciously shuffles away. Her vision swims and her midsection contracts as if she’s about to vomit up everything she’s ever eaten. Somehow, she manages to stay upright this time. “But yes it – _you_ – hurt. Being here is unpleasant.”

“You don’t remember me.”

“I … do not,” she lies. How does she begin to explain to him that she remembers everything and nothing, all at the same time, and looking at him is like watching planets smash into each other, cosmic billiard balls pulverizing her memory until everything is dust, a cloud that hides the truth? What does one say, to articulate such an experience?

Swallowing a sour lump in her throat, Leela shifts to stand beside his door, a few paces down, so she doesn’t have to look at him anymore. The waves of nausea persist, but as she stares at the grey wall instead of his face, she doesn’t feel the urge to curl into a fetal position anymore, and the black spots clear from her vision.

The man presses to the small porthole, trying to catch a glimpse of her even at this impossible angle. “I saw the data extracts of what happened at the Pillars of Consequence. I watched you get disintegrated. How are you here, now?”

Ah. This single memory is clearer than all the others, and has been since the moment she woke up on this planet. The man really does know her, if he knows of that fight. “There were Daleks. One of them was different than the others. I met it in battle, and I ended up here. That is all I know,” she replies.

“Please, Leela, you trusted me once. We trusted each other, and you can trust me now. Let me out of here. We have to get off planet. I can take you back to Gallifrey – or somewhere safe – and find a way to fix whatever did this to you.”

“I have no codes to open the lock on this door, and no authority to release you. Anyway, the guard captain is nearby, so do not ask me again,” she says.

“Then speak with whoever does have authority. Although at this point, we might not have enough time to go through proper local channels.” He pauses. “Once, I saw you render a guard unconscious with a single blow. You could do that.”

“I will not assault the guard captain, he is kind and honorable.”

A resigned sigh. “It was probably too much to hope for.”

“You said we do not have time. What do you mean? Time before what?”

“The Daleks you faced at the Pillars of Consequence, they’re coming here, too.”

“The Daleks? Here?!” For an instant, the nausea and headache recede under a sharp stab of alarm. This new feeling doesn’t make her shrink; quite the opposite, in fact. She swells with fury and hate, because she remembers these monsters with crystal clarity, from every version of every life she has lived. They have always been – will always be – the enemy.

“They’ll be here soon,” he replies. “I came to … try to save these people.” She recognizes his tone of voice, because he always (sometimes will? never did?) sounds this way when he’s obfuscating. He isn’t a liar, though; she’s certain of that, too.

“You can stop them?” Leela asks, surprised at her own shrillness.

From the corner of her eye, she sees the look on his face – as if there’s nothing in the universe he wants more than to tell her yes. Partially because he genuinely wants to help these people, and mostly because she asked him to do it. “The Delmarkians took my ship. If I can just get to it, I can at least try.”

“You have weapons powerful enough to stop them?”

“Not,” he says slowly, “here with me.”

“Then your people are nearby, and will arrive quickly?”

He is silent, and she aches to look at him properly, so she can read the reply in his expression. She also doesn’t want to vomit up her dinner pollen, so she fixes her eyes on her feet instead. Eventually he whispers, “Leela, we have to leave. And when we go, we'll try to save a few.”

Shock brings her head up, and she shoots him an angry glance. Black spots swim in her vision and a fresh round of nausea washes over her as she barks, “I will not run away! I refuse to leave anyone behind to face the Daleks, if they are truly coming.”

“Omega save us all, of course you won’t,” he says, not hiding his exhaustion and exasperation. He is _annoyed_ with her, for refusing to abandon her friends to die!

Something inside Leela’s brain begins winding into a tight coil, in anticipation of a knock-down, drag-out argument with the man in the cell. This autonomic response, an instinct as natural as breathing, makes her feel closer to her true self than she’s been in … forever. Maybe if she just shouts at him loud and long enough, and he shouts back, the cloud in her mind will clear, and she’ll _remember_.

“But you _would_ run, wouldn’t you? Coward!” she says.

“Savage,” he breathes so softly he obviously did not intend for her to hear, and with such tenderness that her anger draws up short. As if these insults they have exchanged are somehow terms of affection. In spite of herself she turns to fully look at him, and her brief moment of clarity is drowned in another wave of nausea and creeping panic. The coil in her brain unravels, fog creeping into the space between her neurons once more. Turning her back on him completely, swallowing bile, she stares down the opposite end of the corridor. The Delmarkian guard sits at his desk, head tilted as his hypersensitive ears hear everything being said.

The man in the cell taps his fingers anxiously at the edge of the porthole, where he’s straining to see her from this sharp angle. He obviously decides on a different tack: “Leela, I know you can’t remember me right now, but you trust me, because we know each other. Quite. Ah. Quite well, in fact.”

“We did,” she says, something between agreement and a question. “Earlier, you spoke of Gallifrey?”

“You lived there for many years, with the Time Lords. It’s where we met.” He clears his throat. “Do you remember anything about Gallifrey? Or Romana? Or your … your … husband?”

“I had a husband,” she says, again not quite a question and not quite a statement. She has had so many, a dozen husbands and fourteen wives, in every possible timeline. The memories crowd each other and become hazy, so she cannot recall their names or faces.

“Andred,” the man in the cell says, his voice strangely flat. “You married a Time Lord named Andred.”

“No.”

“I am not lying to you.”

“I know you would not lie,” Leela replies. Andred was her husband, but he also wasn’t; he died the day they met, and she died in his arms during their ninety-seventh year of marriage.

The voice in the cell speaking of Andred – this voice saying the word ‘husband’ – she has heard it murmuring terms of endearment in darkness; she has felt it rumbling in her ear, as she rested against someone’s chest. Once, long ago, this voice screamed her name in warning before an explosion, and the brightest flash of light she’s ever seen; this voice gasped her name again as she cradled a dying man in the Artron Forum, and felt (but couldn’t see) the life leave his body. His is the voice of the dead.

“Take my hand. We Time Lords have some telepathic capabilities. You’ve allowed me – that is to say, we’ve joined minds before. We can do it again now. Let me see what’s wrong, and perhaps I can fix what has made you sick. Or at least understand it better.”

She hazards another glance toward the cell, and finds his arm sticking through the porthole, fingers grasping in her direction. A makeshift splint covers his pinky, as if he was wounded and had to bind the injury himself. She could take his hand without even stepping closer. Looking at him and thinking about him are both agony; she cannot begin to imagine what torment it would be, to touch him. The very thought makes her feel as if she’s vibrating out of her skin, her vision swimming with black, every nerve burning with the need to get as far away as possible. 

Edging away from his hand, her back scraping against the stone wall, she moves down the corridor until she can breathe again, and her creeping sense of dread recedes.

“Leela, please!” His carefully collected calm is beginning to wear away; this plea holds a note of unvarnished panic. He yanks his arm back into the cell and presses his face to the opening again, trying to catch a glimpse of her, but the angle is all wrong.

Eyes closed, hands pressed to her roiling stomach, she leans against the wall and regulates her breathing so she won’t vomit. It would be so much easier, if she wasn’t here with him. She has all the information she needs: this Time Lord is not dangerous, but the Daleks are, and they are coming. She’ll help the Delmarkian authorities prepare. When the battle is finished, she’ll convince the Delmarkians to let him go on his way. And once she does all these things, she’ll never have to see him – or feel this profound sickness – again.

“Are you still there? Leela!? Merciful Other, not again! I can't lose you again!”


	3. Chapter 3

Talking was a mistake. Narvin sees that now. It was needlessly self-indulgent; after all, the last time he talked Leela into doing something she didn’t want to was so long ago, the war hadn’t even started.

He shoves away from the door and dives at the disassembled hammock-sling with a vengeance, ignoring the pain lancing through his broken finger. The splint is inadequate, the bone misaligned, and if he lives through what’s about to happen to Delmark Twelve, it’ll heal crookedly. He’ll have to re-set it when he gets back to his ship, and that process will hurt like a sonofabitch, but for now he can’t afford to waste time seeing to it properly.

As he yanks the long pieces of structural wire from the sling seams, he feels Leela hovering halfway down the corridor. If he can just get this door open, and maybe … Pandak’s balls, what? Carry her out of here? She’ll shove a knife into his hearts, probably right after she vomits all over him. Maybe before, if he’s lucky. Knock her unconscious? A daunting prospect, given her reflexes and the fact that he doesn’t have a staser with a stun setting. He’s self-aware enough to know he hasn’t a chance of besting her in a hand-to-hand confrontation. During the entire time he’s known her, he’s only physically pinned her down a handful of times, always in dark bedrooms and with the crystal clear understanding that she allowed it to happen because she enjoyed the things he did to her, when she was flat on her back.

She certainly won’t like what he intends to do to her here and now. He hasn’t got a chance of besting her when she’s fighting for her life, which she’ll definitely be in a mood for when he tries to force her off this planet, even if it’s for her own good.

He hasn’t any idea what sort of chronon sickness has seized hold of her brain, and while he’s certain she’s the proper Leela, she still isn’t exactly herself. If he had a TARDIS he might be able to sort this all out, and give her the help she needs, but all he’s got is a jalopy of a ship without temporal tech. Even if he gets her onboard, he certainly can’t take her back to Gallifrey for help. Not with the state things are in, right now.

Narvin’s going to have to find a Renegade with a de-listed TARDIS to fix this mess. Omega help him, he can’t do that without going Renegade, himself.

“What are you doing in there?” Leela’s voice stills his fingers, and he forces himself to breathe. He’s been using his respiratory bypass far more than necessary, and he’s getting a little dizzy. Or maybe it’s the proximity to such a strong temporal anomaly that makes him feel this way.

Maybe it’s just Leela, and how much he’s missed her, and how she isn’t actually dead. Maybe it’s the looming prospect that he won’t be fast enough, or clever enough, to get them both out of this situation.

“Nothing worth mentioning,” he calls, without looking up from his task. He’s twisting the wire together now, so it’s long enough to stretch from the pipe he’s jury-rigged between both light sockets, to the door lock mechanism.

“You are a bad liar.” She pauses. “You always have been.”

He swallows. He doesn’t know what to make of the things she’s said, and what sort of state the chronon disruption has left her memory in. Sometimes she seems to be on the cusp of remembering, but she never quite makes it over the edge. “Have I?”

“You … are not a liar.” She hasn’t moved from the same spot halfway down the corridor.

He needs at least one more length of wire to reach the door lock mechanism, so he sets about disassembling another seam. The effort of will to kneel on the floor, instead of cramming his face against the tiny porthole opening to catch a glimpse of her, is almost more than he can bear. “A manipulated truth is much more effective for achieving an end, than a flat-out falsehood. So I try not to be a liar any more than is necessary.”

“That sounds honest.”

For a split-second, he forgets his situation and snorts, “As you said literally a half-nanospan ago. I'm glad to know you haven't lost your knack for stating the obvious, Leela.”

The chronon disruption moves a fraction closer, like a gravitational shift. It occurs to Narvin, as he twists another length of wire together, that the rush of urgency he feels might not only be from Leela’s anomalous condition, but also from the disaster vibrating down this particular timeline. The same impending disaster he’s felt, since he first landed on this planet, except closer and more imminent.

His fingers move faster on the wire, pulling them taut toward the door. He’s still one meter short. He dives into the decimated sling one last time.

A soft, almost imperceptible tremor moves through the concrete floor of his cell. An impact from some distance away, but some kind of jolt nonetheless. More of instinct than anything else, because he always feels the urge to reach toward her in a crisis, he calls out, “Leela?”

A hairs-breadth after his own inquiry, the guard down the corridor shouts, “Lady Red-Wing!”

The chronon disruption moves further away from Narvn’s cell, toward the guard, and he frantically twists the last length of wire from the binary power supply to the door lock mechanism. “Bugger! Leela, wait!”

“What is it?” Leela is far away now, toward the exterior of the building, speaking to the Delmarkian guard. The last bit of wire in place, Narvin forces the active electrical end into the edge of the flat-panel lock mechanism on his side of the prison door.

“I have something important to tell you!” he shouts, because at this point he’ll say anything to keep her nearby. If she leaves this building, finding her again will prove difficult. “Something about your past! Something about us!”

He can hardly make out the words the insectoid guard says to her. Something about “explosion.” Her reply is muffled, and briefly louder – something about not leaving – but Narvin is too focused on the task at hand: opening this door, and physically getting in proximity to the woman he loves. A second tremor, stronger this time, shakes the prison. Too many minutes tick by as Narvin works to force the door open, the sensation of chronon disruption vanishing completely, because Leela has left the prison building.

His cell door opens with an unimpressive noise, switching into disarmed mode with the hiss of a bat-snake slithering into the dark. Narvin dashes into the corridor. As he expected, he finds it empty. Leela and the guard are long gone.

“Leela!” he shouts, barreling through the empty hallway, wondering at the fact that all the other cells are empty. Either they brought him to a holding facility where he could be interrogated alone, or perhaps – improbably – this world is so peaceful, it doesn’t have enough criminals to fill these cells. Such a peaceful world could not hope to mount even a marginally effective defense against the Daleks. And he has no doubt that the increasingly frequent earth tremors, and the distant sounds of energy weapons discharging, are evidence of the invasion he knew was coming.

A few guards mill uncertainly about the lobby of the prison building, all of them turning to stare at him as he emerges from the cell block. Before anyone can say or do anything about the fact that he’s not locked up, the strongest tremor yet ripples through the building.

Seizing hold of the wall to keep his feet, Narvin wobbles toward the exit as everyone else ducks, covering their heads with their wings and making loud chirruping noises of distress. Corbels and paintings come tumbling off the walls, and pieces of daubed plaster-like mud cake down from the decorative ceiling.

Order of operations, order of operations, tactically critical order of operations.

Find Leela, and try to wrestle her back to his ship? Or find the ship, and bring it to Leela? He’s cobbled together something that passes for a functional scanner, but using it to find human life signs in this chaos will be risky. If he had any sort of temporal tech onboard, he might be able to trace her raging chronon distortion field; as it is, he doesn’t even have the precious few minutes to jury-rig an alternative from the single time torpedo in his weapons array.

He dashes out the front door, takes one look at the spiderweb of alleys branching from this building, and the teeming crowds flitting around in a panic, and ducks back inside the prison. A stunned guard stands by the front door, and he grabs her shoulder, her chitin exoskeleton hard beneath his fingers.

“The other one like me, the woman with red hair! Where did she go?”

The guard’s shoulders bunched up around her ears, wings flitting in panic, she trills, “What did you bring with you? What have you done to us?”

“Fine then, where is the Magistrate’s office?”

The guard flinches as something explodes a few blocks away. Narvin can hear the tinny, inevitable voices that accompany that sort of destruction, these days: _Exterminate, exterminate!_

“Listen, we don’t have time to stand around stammering in shock. Yes, your world is being invaded by tin-pot death machines. No, it isn’t my fault, and no, I can’t stop them. Now tell me where the human with red hair went, and I’ll take you with me when I leave this planet. I’ll save you!" Her large dark eyes are as unreadable as the singularity of a black hole, her mandibles clicking like an old man smacking his lips. Hand tightening on her shoulder, Narvin jostles her. “Damn you, tell me!”

“My family,” the Delmarkian rasps, as the building shakes again and more decorative mud flakes down from the ceiling. “What about my family?”

“Get me to the woman with red hair, and I’ll save them too,” Narvin says. Odds are slim he’ll have time to do anything except get out of here by the skin of his teeth, if he’s lucky. His promise is earnest, but unlikely.

“Magistrate Wildflutter summoned Lady Red-Wing, because she has spoken of these metal monsters before and tried to convince him to make preparations against their arrival,” the guard says. “Come, come.”

Narvin pauses only to collect a Delmarkian weapon – vaguely pistol-like, and hopefully not difficult to master – before he dashes into the narrow street. Once outside, the guard immediately takes to the air, wings flitting elegantly and delicate feet folding up beneath her abdomen. With a soft curse, Narvin breaks into a sprint and tries to keep up.

The air is full of a nauseatingly familiar cacophony: the screams of a populace under attack, overlaid with the buzz of weaponry and shrill chant of Dalek voices, repeating orders over and over again like a replicating virus. As he runs in the narrow, unpaved streets, he opens his time and telepathic senses, searching for any trace of Leela’s human mind or paradoxical chronon residue, but there’s nothing. Only the chaotic, overwhelming panic of thousands of alien minds as they face death.  Conflict thunders louder by the nanospan, the harsh sound of Dalek attack now layered over with the sound of the indigenous peoples’ air defenses that have been roused in response to the invasion. Delicate iridescent craft buzz above the building tops, wings made of translucent material that flit too fast for the eye to follow, like a dragonfly. They have energy weapons, at least, and look like they might even be space-worthy.

Narvin has seen enough Dalek invasions to know that this is a mission of destruction, not occupation. No one on this planet will survive, and their defense forces don’t stand even a remote chance of stopping this slaughter, but at least the pilots might escape if they don’t stay to the bitter end.

Narvin must be the only living creature on the ground, he reckons, but the airspace in the alleys between buildings is thick with panicking Delmarkians trying to flee the Daleks as they sweep through each street, gunstalks blazing. If the guard wasn’t wearing a distinctive orange uniform, Narvin would have lost track of her seven blocks ago.

She alights at the top of a ramp into a large building and gestures frantically for him to follow. Most of these winged species would simply fly through the front door, but because this world has evolved far enough to care large-scale for its disabled population, they have created accessible entrances for those whose wings are injured or missing. Puffing and gasping, and too frantic to worry about how undignified he looks, he sprints up the long ramp to the second story of the building and joins the guard.

“Magistrate Wildflutter is here,” she says, clicking nervously. “His legal chambers are at the center of the building, and the defense ministry is in the back. I do not know where he will be, in a time such as this.”

“Defense ministry,” Narvin says, striding past her as though he has a single clue which corridor to take. She flits ahead of him, moving fast, and with a sigh he starts jogging again to keep up. A frantic five microspans later, they’ve located the Magistrate and managed to convince him that Narvin is not to blame for this state of affairs, and in fact he might be able to help.

He informs Narvin that Leela has already joined the defense forces in the air, flying alongside the Delmarkians into the thick of battle. Of course she has, Omega curse her recklessly brave spirit.

“Where’s my ship?” Narvin demands, exerting every last ounce of self-control to keep his hands by his side, instead of grabbing the Magistrate by his clothes and shaking him.

“The shipyards behind the Ministry,” Magistrate Wildflutter replies. “Now tell me how we can defeat these monsters!”

“If your forces must fight, tell them to aim for the eyestalks. But the best thing you can do is evacuate, starting right now. Get everyone you can clear of this system, and don’t look back. I’m sorry, but your planet is dead, so salvage your people and go.” Narvin turns to the guard who has served as his guide. “Show me to the shipyard, and we’ll see about your family.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the canon-compliant ending that dovetails into Big Finish's War Master 4 box set ([transcript here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17494190/chapters/41205194)). If you're in a mood for a fix-it ending instead, skip right to [chapter 5](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17494190/chapters/42755366).

Miraculously, the Delmarkians haven’t done much damage to his ship; they’ve obviously crawled around in his tech, but haven’t stripped anything out yet. Narvin plops into the pilot’s seat, while the guard flits into the storage area behind the cockpit.

“Where is your family?” he asks, as he fires up the engine’s ignition sequence so fast, the primary thrusters cough and sputter alarmingly. They ignite, though, and the ship bobbles into the air before steadying out and zipping upward, into the melee above.

“Quarter Circumboreal, in the northeast section of the city,” she says, wringing her hands a few times before she pulls her weapon from its holster and situates herself beside the nearest hatch, as if expecting Daleks to burst into his ship at any second.

“And where is the First Fleet?”

She turns her mirror-like black eyes on him. “How would I know? I’m not part of the air guard, I serve in the constabulary.”

 _Shit_. He was in such a hurry, so preoccupied with how to get Leela onboard with her raging chronon sickness, he didn’t think of the obvious need to kidnap a soldier, in addition to this prison guard.

“Yes, yes, but do they have any distinctive markings on their aircraft? Any numbers or symbols?”

“They will be where the fighting is thickest. That is all I know,” she replies, mandibles clicking nervously.

Since she won’t be any more help, he maxes out his engines for speed and drops her off atop a building near her home, with a promise to return in half a span, to pick up her family.

And with that, Narvin flings his jalopy of a spaceship into battle.

This is the opposite of his usual modus operandi on a battlefront world – usually he’d jet out of the solar system immediately after escaping his cell, observe from the far side of a moon, cataloguing Delmark Twelve’s fate for the sake of history and whatever gaps might exist in the Matrix record. After all, his ship has thick enough armor plating, but no weaponry or tech effective against a real Dalek attack. If he had a proper battle TARDIS, he might plant himself on the front line of these worlds as they go down in a blaze of glory, but flinging himself into certain death in a decrepit ship is illogical and wasteful.

Leela will probably call him a coward for his reasoning, but he’d rather be alive to answer Romana’s summons when the time comes for him to return to Gallifrey and stand against Rassilon, than dead defending a species that has no chance of survival anyway. After all, what good is one woefully underpowered Time Lord against a fully-armed Dalek planetary attack unit?

Today is the day Narvin decides to find out the answer to this question.

He’s spent several months coping with this ship’s quirks – its sluggish left engine, its slightly redshifted navigation system, its malfunctioning water heater and cold showers. He knows exactly which systems can function on minimal power, or not at all, and where he can divert energy to increase maneuverability and firepower.

He’s at much at risk from the Delmarkians as the Daleks, given the fact that his ship is foreign to all of them. Setting all of his scanners to maximum, he flits from one firefight to another across the metropolis, searching for any unusual heat patterns or battle tactics or anything at all that might indicate the presence of an alien – someone who knows the Daleks, who knows how to confront them effectively.

In the southernmost suburbs, on the cusp of vast flowered farmlands, he finds a squadron of Delmarkian fighters in an unusual tactical formation. They’ve pinned down a squad of Daleks, peppering them with coordinated rounds of fire until they’re hemmed in a circle and then strafing them with bombs of some kind. The explosives aren’t strong enough to break Dalek armor, however, so Narvin hails the Delmarkians – giving them at least a few seconds’ warning – before he trains his targeting systems on the eyestalks and blasts them with his energy weapons, augmented with power diverted from a dozen other ship systems.

The Dalek squadron is left a smoldering ruin.

“Lady Red-Wing,” Narvin pleads into his communication system, as the Delmarkians cheer through their microphones on the other end. “Is Lady Red-Wing on one of your ships? Where is the First Fleet?!”

One of them stops celebrating just long enough to reply that none of them know who he’s talking about, but the First Fleet might be somewhere in the eastern quadrant of the city. Narvin mutters a word, profane enough so that somewhere deep inside of himself he can feel his uptight first incarnation cringing in shock.

This pattern plays several more times: when he isn’t being shot at by the natives, none of them seem to know who Leela is. He finds the main Delmarkian battleships, floating ponderously through the air like lazy bumblebees on a summer afternoon, but can’t get close enough to hail them and ask whether Leela might be onboard.

He returns to pick up the prison guard and her family. He tells himself he would have kept his promise and come back for her, even if he’d already found Leela, and he isn’t just here because having a native Delmarkian onboard might prove useful in the short-term.

The battle is a slaughter, agonizing and inexorable. With an infant caterpillar creature wailing in the back of his ship, his hearts and stomach thick with desperate dread, Narvin does what he can as the surface of the planet is set alight, the whole of a civilization razed to rubble because the Dalek Time Controller decided this system should be removed from the intergalactic chessboard. Every time a Delmarkian ship goes down and he doesn’t know whether Leela was aboard or not, Narvin feels like a piece of his flesh has been stripped away, until every square inch of him is raw and exposed and quivering in horror.

Eventually the commanders aboard the last two Delmarkian battleships listen to his pleas, and call their fighters to retreat. The fleet does what they should’ve done at the beginning: ascends through the atmosphere and abandons the star system altogether.

As the rag-tag group of leftover ships jump to hyperspeed just past the moon’s orbit, Narvin stays behind just long enough to launch his single time torpedo at the largest of the Dalek saucers in orbit, crippling its engines before he follows.

Communication between the ships is spotty; Narvin leads them to a moon orbiting around a gas giant, far enough away from the Daleks to buy them a couple of dozen years, at least. The atmosphere is breathable, and the life forms not particularly sentient. After he uses his onboard med-kit to mend his broken finger and bandage up the cuts and scrapes of the Delmarkian family on his ship, he spends a few days helping these shattered refugees scrape together the remnants of their civilization.

He’s there to greet every straggling ship with survivors; none of them hold Leela. Lady Red-Wing went down in the first wave of the battle, along with the Monarch Squadron Leader, one of them says. At least that’s what they heard, from someone else, who might have been on another ship that made it off-planet in time.

The human died trying to save her adopted Delmarkian family, someone else tells him. That whole suburb was firebombed into a smoldering crater, no one made it out alive.

Magistrate Wildflutter recalled Leela’s squadron and sent her on a secret mission against the Daleks, and she is still carrying out that order even though Wildflutter died – and the rest of the government along with him – before the military could extract him from the capitol.

She took down three Dalek saucers single-handed; she was the one who summoned the Daleks to Delmark, in collusion with Narvin himself. There are nearly as many stories as there are survivors. Which is, to be fair, a tragically small number. A disturbingly large number of them of them look to him as some sort of savior, as if he’s done something remarkable in fighting for them and leading them to this place of relative safety. The attention makes Narvin uncomfortable; the lack of information about Leela nearly drives him mad.

The one thing that every new refugee agrees on is that Delmark Twelve is a smoking ruin from pole to pole.

Narvin returns anyway. The Daleks have long gone, their objective achieved in the space of a single solar day, this world’s people its only strategic value. He lands in the ashes of the metropolitan city where he was held prisoner. He finds so many corpses, they stop looking like bodies at a certain point, and simply look like more charred pieces of rubble. But all of them are insectoid, cracked chitin and pale guts. Which is not to say that Leela couldn’t be dead under a collapsed building, in the hulking ruin of a fighter ship, or vaporized into the fine dust that coats everything, even Narvin’s lungs. But it also doesn’t mean that she _is_.

He returns to his ship, and he drifts in space for three days. He composes a dozen different messages to Romana, and deletes them all. What could he possibly say, that would be worth risking a transmission over their secret back-channel? That Leela was dead, and then alive, and now is probably dead again? That she died a second time, still fighting the Daleks? That all traces of her have been erased just like before?

Romana knows these things. They are the same things that were true before Leela showed up at the door of Narvin’s prison cell on this tiny backwater planet. Cosmically speaking, nothing has changed.

Personally speaking, everything has changed. He wasn’t clever or quick enough, and now the woman he loves is gone, again, probably properly dead this time. Surely the universe would not be generous enough, to let her survive the exact same death twice.

Instead of a message to Romana, Narvin simply files his official scouting report to Mantus and the IDU: _Delmark Twelve overtaken and destroyed by hostile forces. Populace decimated. Moving on to next assignment._

 

~~~~~~

 

Leela has trouble keeping track of time, these days. Sometimes she can’t recall exactly how long ago her family on Delmark died – months, years, decades, they all blur together. She has always been, and will always be, fighting the Daleks. Here in this dark place, the Obsidian Nebula, these skirmishes have gone on for eternity.

When she sleeps, though, Leela dreams and time makes sense. Her life makes sense. No one calls her the Lady of Obsidian, during these dreams. There is a woman, a lady who holds time in her hands and wears three different faces, who calls her friend. There is a man – he is locked in a cell, or he is arguing with her, or he is asleep in her bed – who calls her soft things in the dark, his face alight with love.

In these dreams, she feels fully alive. And then she wakes and the dreams vanish, and memories with them, and she is simply the Lady of Obsidian, and she fights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bummed out? Regrettng your life choices? No worries! [I can fix that!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17494190/chapters/42755366)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the (happy) fix-it ending that has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of Big Finish canon. If you'd like to read a more canon-compliant ending, skip back to [Chapter 4](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17494190/chapters/42755330#workskin).

Miraculously, the Delmarkians haven’t done much damage to his ship; they’ve obviously crawled around in his tech, but haven’t stripped anything out yet. Narvin plops into the pilot’s seat, while the guard flits into the storage area behind the cockpit.

“Where is your family?” he asks, as he fires up the engine’s ignition sequence so fast, the primary thrusters cough and sputter alarmingly. They ignite, though, and the ship bobbles into the air before steadying out and zipping upward, into the melee above.

“Quarter Circumboreal, in the northeast section of the city,” she says, wringing her hands a few times before she pulls her weapon from its holster and situates herself beside the nearest hatch, as if expecting Daleks to burst into his ship at any second.

“And where is the First Fleet?”

She turns her mirror-like black eyes on him. “How would I know? I’m not part of the air guard, I serve in the constabulary.”

 _Shit_. He was in such a hurry, so preoccupied with how to get Leela onboard with her raging chronon sickness, he didn’t think of the obvious need to kidnap a soldier, in addition to this prison guard.

“Yes, yes, but do they have any distinctive markings on their aircraft? Any numbers or symbols?”

“They will be where the fighting is thickest. That is all I know,” she replies, mandibles clicking nervously.

Since she won’t be any more help, he maxes out his engines for speed and drops her off atop a building near her home, with a promise to return in half a span, to pick up her family.

And with that, Narvin flings his jalopy of a spaceship into battle.

This is the opposite of his usual modus operandi on a battlefront world – usually he’d jet out of the solar system immediately after escaping his cell, observe from the far side of a moon, cataloguing Delmark Twelve’s fate for the sake of history and whatever gaps might exist in the Matrix record. After all, his ship has thick enough armor plating, but no weaponry or tech effective against a real Dalek attack. If he had a proper battle TARDIS, he might plant himself on the front line of these worlds as they go down in a blaze of glory, but flinging himself into certain death in a decrepit ship is illogical and wasteful.

Leela will probably call him a coward for his reasoning, but he’d rather be alive to answer Romana’s summons when the time comes for him to return to Gallifrey and stand against Rassilon, than dead defending a species that has no chance of survival anyway. After all, what good is one woefully underpowered Time Lord against a fully-armed Dalek planetary attack unit?

Today is the day Narvin decides to find out the answer to this question.

He’s spent several months coping with this ship’s quirks – its sluggish left engine, its slightly redshifted navigation system, its malfunctioning water heater and cold showers. He knows exactly which systems can function on minimal power, or not at all, and where he can divert energy to increase maneuverability and firepower.

He’s at much at risk from the Delmarkians as the Daleks, given the fact that his ship is foreign to all of them. Setting all of his scanners to maximum, he flits from one firefight to another across the metropolis, searching for any unusual heat patterns or battle tactics or anything at all that might indicate the presence of an alien – someone who knows the Daleks, who knows how to confront them effectively.

In the southernmost suburbs, on the cusp of vast flowered farmlands, he finds a squadron of Delmarkian fighters in an unusual tactical formation. They’ve pinned down a squad of Daleks, peppering them with coordinated rounds of fire until they’re hemmed in a circle and then strafing them with bombs of some kind. The explosives aren’t strong enough to break Dalek armor, however, so Narvin hails the Delmarkians – giving them at least a few seconds’ warning – before he trains his targeting systems on the eyestalks and blasts them with his energy weapons, augmented with power diverted from a dozen other ship systems.

The Dalek squadron is left a smoldering ruin.

“Lady Red-Wing,” Narvin pleads into his communication system, as the Delmarkians cheer through their microphones on the other end. “Is Lady Red-Wing on one of your ships? Where is the First Fleet?!”

One of them stops celebrating just long enough to reply that none of them know who he’s talking about, but the First Fleet might be somewhere in the eastern quadrant of the city. Narvin mutters a word, profane enough so that somewhere deep inside of himself he can feel his uptight first incarnation cringing in shock.

This pattern plays several more times: when he isn’t being shot at by the natives, none of them seem to know who Leela is. He finds the main Delmarkian battleships, floating ponderously through the air like lazy bumblebees on a summer afternoon, but can’t get close enough to hail them and ask whether Leela might be onboard.

He returns to pick up the prison guard and her family. He tells himself he would have kept his promise and come back for her, even if he’d already found Leela, and he isn’t just here because having a native Delmarkian onboard might prove useful in the short-term.

The battle is a slaughter, agonizing and inexorable. With an infant caterpillar creature wailing in the back of his ship, his hearts and stomach thick with desperate dread, Narvin does what he can as the surface of the planet is set alight, the whole of a civilization razed to rubble because the Dalek Time Controller decided this system should be removed from the intergalactic chessboard. Every time a Delmarkian ship goes down and he doesn’t know whether Leela was aboard or not, Narvin feels like a piece of his flesh has been stripped away, until every square inch of him is raw and exposed and quivering in horror.

Eventually the commanders aboard the last two Delmarkian battleships listen to his pleas, and call their fighters to retreat. The fleet does what they should’ve done at the beginning: ascends through the atmosphere and abandons the star system altogether.

As the rag-tag group of leftover ships jump to hyperspeed just past the moon’s orbit, Narvin stays behind just long enough to launch his single time torpedo at the largest of the Dalek saucers in orbit, crippling its engines before he follows.

Communication between the ships is spotty; Narvin leads them to a moon orbiting around a gas giant, far enough away from the Daleks to buy them a couple of dozen years, at least. The atmosphere is breathable, and the life forms not particularly sentient. After he uses his onboard med-kit to mend his broken finger and bandage up the cuts and scrapes of the Delmarkian family on his ship, he spends a few days helping these shattered refugees scrape together the remnants of their civilization.

He’s there to greet every straggling ship with survivors; none of them hold Leela. Lady Red-Wing went down in the first wave of the battle, along with the Monarch Squadron Leader, one of them says. At least that’s what they heard, from someone else, who might have been on another ship that made it off-planet in time.

The human died trying to save her adopted Delmarkian family, someone else tells him. That whole suburb was firebombed into a smoldering crater, no one made it out alive.

Magistrate Wildflutter recalled Leela’s squadron and sent her on a secret mission against the Daleks, and she is still carrying out that order even though Wildflutter died – and the rest of the government along with him – before the military could extract him from the capitol.

She took down three Dalek saucers single-handed; she was the one who summoned the Daleks to Delmark, in collusion with Narvin himself. There are nearly as many stories as there are survivors. Which is, to be fair, a tragically small number. A disturbingly large number of them of them look to him as some sort of savior, as if he’s done something remarkable in fighting for them and leading them to this place of relative safety. The attention makes Narvin uncomfortable; the lack of information about Leela nearly drives him mad.

The one thing that every new refugee agrees on is that Delmark Twelve is a smoking ruin from pole to pole.

She’s on one of the last ships to limp into the refugee camp, in a storage hold packed with more corpses than survivors. They’re piled on the floor like firewood, not having been seen to since they were loaded in, because the only conscious person is the pilot. He staggers out of the cockpit after a rough landing, exhausted and leaking pale guts from a crack in his abdomen.

Narvin has decided this will be the last ship he receives here, before he goes back to the smoking ruin of Delmark Twelve to look for Leela, or her corpse. He opens the door to the ship’s hold and the overwhelming stench of death rolls over him, but he follows the protocol he’s developed over the last few days anyway: triage for the injured, sorting them into those who can help and those who need to be helped.

He notices her pink skin first, stark contrast against the purple and grey of the rest of the bodies in this cramped space. She’s crumpled into a corner, unconscious and hardly breathing, and as he clambers across the room to her it occurs to him, for the first time, that if she’s mortally wounded he doesn’t know enough about human biology to save her life.

“Leela,” he chokes, trying not to breathe in this fetid space. “Leela, are you awake?”

She isn’t.

Which is probably a blessing, because if she was, he’d have a fight (or at least some vomit) on his hands. As it is, he lifts her bruised and bloodied body from the pile, cradling her to his chest, and picks his way out of the ship, pushing past the rush of Delmarkians searching for their own loved ones. Leela feels heavier than he remembered. By the time he carries her across the threshold of his ship like the bride he’s never had, he’s winded and staggering.

He deposits her on the single small bunk in the living cubicle, and draws back to stare at her. She’s bloody but not still bleeding, all of her limbs seem to be sturdy and unbroken, although he can’t vouch for her ribs and internal organs. Perched on the edge of the bunk, he rests a hand on her breastbone and feels her chest rise and fall. He lets out his own stuttering breath, blinking back warm moisture in his eyes, feeling the universe and time itself fold into stillness here and now, as if reality has no meaning outside of this small, cramped space.

She stinks of death and ozone, she’s filthy and injured, and she’s the most beautiful sight Narvin has ever seen in all of his lives.

With the careful, reverent attention of a medic leaning over a patient to deliver mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he brings his hand to her face and murmurs, “Contact.”

It’s like stepping into a sandstorm.

Hundreds of thousands of memories whip at his consciousness, pinging against his defenses with wild determination. The sheer number of lifetimes contained inside Leela’s mind is staggering; it’s a testament to her strength that she didn’t collapse into madness the first day, coping with this sort of existence. Fighting the storm would be fruitless, and he hasn’t a chance of calming it. Instead, he stretches himself into the chaos, searching for a handful of very specific memories. The task is so vast, he might as well be looking for a single specific asteroid adrift in a galaxy. He eventually finds a few memory threads from a few different timelines, and different lifetimes, tracing down them with avid determination.

He’d like to establish at least a half dozen anchor points, but he only manages to locate two of the memories he’s seeking. Only one of them is from Leela’s proper timeline, the other is from another life altogether. Beggars can’t be choosers, so he uses it as an anchor too. These memories are of the times he's joined minds with her before; intimate moments, both of them, happy encounters. He does what he can to pin these memories in a place of prominence inside her mind, so she'll have something to hold on to when she wakes up. Hopefully, it's enough to keep her from being physically sick when she claps eyes on him. 

When he finally finishes, he realizes that so much time has passed, the sky outside has gone dark. Woozy and exhausted, he fetches a damp rag to dab the blood from her face and arms. That’s all he manages before he slides off the bunk and into a hunched, half-seated position on the floor, and slips into something between sleep and unconsciousness.

He wakes up to find Leela sitting on the bunk and staring at him, her knees drawn to her chest.

“It is you,” she says.

She hasn’t run away or vomited all over him, so Narvin considers this a victory. He agrees, “Indeed, I'm me.” 

“Where are Serra and Nadee and Breowyn?” Leela asks.

“Are these some of your friends from Delmark?” he asks.

Her face scrunches into a concerned frown, and she regards him as though he’s the one who’s lost hold of reality. “These are our daughters, Narvin.”

“Our … daughters.” Narvin ruthlessly squelches his instinct to correct her, his hands twitching with the effort. Of the two memories he anchored her to, she has obviously gravitated toward the one from the wrong timeline. This wrinkle should sort itself out, once he gets her into a TARDIS for proper treatment, but in the meantime correcting her misconception might destroy the anchors he created, and send her spiraling into time-sickness again. The wisest course of action is to play along, until Leela is cured. “Our daughters, of course. They’re safe. Romana is keeping an eye on them.”

“You chose _Romana_ to babysit?” Leela laughs. The incredible sound sends his hearts stammering. “She will bring them to her High Council meetings and bore them to death with her political speeches!”

This is, perhaps, the most idyllic scenario Narvin could conceive of for his three nonexistent daughters. Being a father is a nerve-wracking prospect, but having children whose most dangerous dilemma was falling asleep during a High Council meeting sounds like a dream.

“Romana would do that. But surely our daughters are clever enough to get themselves out of trouble,” he agrees, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. Stiff from sleeping on the floor, he pushes to his feet with a groan.

Leela watches, not moving from the far corner of the bunk. With a nervous lick of her lips, she finally says, “I am sorry they put you in prison, husband. I am sorry I did not … I did not vouch for you.” Confusion and doubt flicker in her eyes. “I did not remember.”

Leela isn’t his wife. Not that he hasn’t entertained the idea. He just never summoned the courage to ask, before the war began, and once it started there never seemed to be enough time. Ironic, for someone who belongs to a race whose entire existence is predicated on the ability to manipulate and protect chronology. Then again, the difference between the timeline of his race, and his own personal timeline, often feels light-years apart.

“Well, things have been difficult for both of us lately.”

She puckers her mouth, eyebrows drawing together. “I remember you, and our bonding ceremony, and the fact that you get annoyed when I leave my socks on your side of the couch. I know that I have married four Time Lords during my life, and you are not the chancellery guardsman, or the President, or the Cerulean gardener. You are the Celestial Intervention agent. But I don’t remember my father’s face, or Romana? You mentioned Romana, a moment ago, and I remember she was President, but I cannot recall if she was my sister, or my lover?”

“You don’t have to remember, because I’m here to help you. Things will be fine. Do you trust me?”

“With my life.”

“Good.”

“Good.” They stare at each other, and her fingers drum against her knees, an impatient gesture. “I want to embrace you, Narvin, but for some reason I do not understand, that feels like a dangerous idea.”

“Then don’t.” He’s disappointed – of course he is. He wants nothing more than to wrap his arms around her warm body, and bury his face in her hair, and soak in her presence like a plant turning toward sunlight. But not if it means she throws up on him, or spirals back into time-sickness and forgets him altogether. “I understand.”

“Where are Farglide and her family?”

Ah, these would be the Delmarkians who adopted Leela.

“They arrived on a ship yesterday. They … didn’t survive the attack. I’m sorry,” he replies, because he’s been scouring each straggling ship for anyone who knew of Leela, or where to find her. He’s made lists of survivors, cross-referenced them, ostensibly for his report to the IDU but more for his own purposes, in trying to run down every last scrap of information on Leela as he attempted to locate her.

“They are dead?” she says, sitting up straight and staring at him with a look of such horror, he wishes he could lie to her again. “Even the little one?”

“Yes.”

She buries her face in her hands and sobs. Narvin should hold her, offer her comfort, but he doesn’t dare touch her, so instead he sits on the bunk beside her and breathes the same air, as bold a gesture of support as he can manage given their current circumstances. He hands her a corner of the blanket, to wipe her tears, and he waits patiently until she’s finished.

“Take me to them,” she says. She uses the tiny lavatory to clean up and dress her own wounds, and then she steps out of his ship to see the Delmarkian refugees.

Within an hour, she’s arguing with him. Of course.

It’s exhilarating and maddening, and it feels more like home than anything else has in … oh, _ages_. As she gets more animated and his instinctive sarcasm rises in response, he has to talk around an emotional lump in his throat.  

They can’t stay here with these people – this is so patently obvious he shouldn’t even have to say it aloud (but he does, with increasing volume and acerbity). Firstly, he’ll never be able to heal her time sickness without a TARDIS; and secondly, their presence here is dangerous, for them and the Delmarkians.

The real question is, once they leave here, how to stall any intervention or awkward questions from the IDU on Gallifrey, in regards to his whereabouts. He could fake his own death, pretend he was caught up in the killing on Delmark Twelve. But Rassilon and Mantus would undoubtedly use this news to torment Romana, and he can’t stomach the idea of putting her through that. He could perhaps return to Gallifrey with his report, letting Leela stay here with the Delmarkian refugees until he gets his next assignment and can come back to collect her. This plan requires him to leave her behind again, which would require a gargantuan amount of self-control and is entirely beyond his capabilities at the moment. Instead, he could perhaps bring her back to Gallifrey, and try to keep her hidden – the most idiotic and dangerous plan.

This leaves him with the one prospect he finds most personally distasteful: going Renegade.

Trying to find another Time Lord who’s willing to let them inside their TARDIS, to allow Leela the exposure to the right kinds of chronon radiation to sort out her time-sickness, that’s an entirely different matter. It’s a quest that might take months or years; it’s just the sort of footloose adventure he loathes.

“We cannot leave my people,” Leela shouts at him, tears of rage and fear glistening in her eyes. A group of Delmarkians shift away, staring at them nervously, hustling into the nearby lean-to that serves as a food tent.

“Leela, these aren’t your people.”

“How can you say such a horrible thing? They are the only people who make sense, in here,” she says, gesturing toward her auburn hair. “They saved me and gave me a home, and now you expect me to abandon them during their time of need?”

The easiest way to convince her would be to lie. _The Daleks came to Delmark Twelve because of you; they followed your anomaly readings across the galaxy._ But she was right, he’s a bad liar, and he’d never forgive himself if he laid that burden on her, when it wasn’t truly hers to bear.

“You wanted me to leave them to the Daleks, and run away with you, when you were in that cell,” Leela continues, her tone darkening.

“I was just trying to be practical,” he snaps. "I'm _still_ being practical. _You're_ being idealistic and sentimental!"

“I cannot believe I married such a coward,” she says, arms crossed and her glare heated enough to melt a glacier.

That draws him up short, diverts his train of thought. "Then why _did_ you marry me?" he replies, keeping his voice sharp and argumentative even as he waits in genuine curiosity for her answer.

She frowns in sudden contemplation, and sucks her bottom lip as she searches her muddled memories. "I do not know." A pause, her eyebrows furrowing as she continues in earnest wonder, "Was it because you are good at kissing? Or because you are clever?"

"I'm good at kissing?" he echoes in surprise, before he can think better of it.

"Perhaps it was because of your large flat in the Capitol, with its many rooms and fancy furniture. Yes, that is why I married you. For your large CIA salary and big house." 

He stares at her in openmouthed shock - is this what happened, in the other timeline and that other life that she's anchored to? She married him for his _money_? But then he notices the corner of her mouth twitch, and he feels like an idiot, because of course she's teasing him. He should've known - as if any timeline exists where the Gallifreyan government adequately compensates him for all his devotion and hard work. 

Ultimately she agrees to a compromise: they will leave only long enough to find supplies and help for the Delmarkians. And in Narvin’s mind, if this mission involves a few detours to a few different systems where a Regenade Time Lord might be, well … things like that just tend to happen, don’t they? After all, when Rassilon and Mantus ousted him and Romana from the CIA, Narvin kept his deeply buried backdoor access codes to the CIA’s data core. He’s been monitoring war reports so he can feed the most important ones to Romana, and even in wartime (especially in wartime) the CIA keeps tabs on all of Gallifrey’s most wayward children, like the Doctor and the Monk.

He sends a mission report on Delmark Twelve to the IDU, reporting the planet destroyed and the casualties complete. He makes no mention of the refugee colony on this moon, but he does mention that his ship was severely damaged in the conflict, and how he’ll need several weeks for repairs. The lie is flimsy, but might buy him some time, before Rassilon sends scouts to track him down.

The quest to find supplies and a Renegade Time Lord takes much longer, and involves more roundabout adventures, than Narvin was prepared for. Every stop comes with complications and inefficient diversions. Leela appears to be in her element, diving into each erstwhile adventure with the zest of someone accustomed to these sorts of inconveniences; she seems to find this sort of existence pleasant, even, and to his horror compares their travels to her time with the Doctor.

Narvin, on the other hand, is about to go spare by the second stop. He can keep a stiff upper lip through plenty of Time War trauma, thankyouverymuch, but if Leela presses him into any more situations solving the mystery of Aunt Lucinda’s haunted teacup, he can’t be held responsible for is own actions. (The teacup wasn’t even haunted. It was a malfunctioning electric shaver from Maraxus, a system in the Phoenix Dwarf Galaxy, and somehow ended up in a secondhand shop in Bakewell, England. After Narvin repaired it, Aunt Lucinda decided to keep the cup, because using it to drink her Darjeeling saved her the trouble of having to pluck the white whiskers sprinkled across her top lip.)

In addition to Aunt Lucinda, they encounter an asteroid shepherd and help him with a bit of trouble with a Dalek scout, and afterward they find themselves on a planet-sized nest of giant, sentient wasps. Fortunately – and unfortunately, as it turns out – the Rani is here, diligently crafting a private army for the Time War out of genetically modified insects. It’s a dreadfully clever bit of DNA engineering, splicing selective bits of TARDIS biotech into their genome so that each individual is capable of short time-jumps, like an organic built-in time-capable transmat.

During the few moments he isn’t running for his life, Narvin takes careful notes of her project for future reference. Not that he’s stark raving mad enough to try such a grossly unethical genetic modification on any living thing, but the principles – the underlying science – is undeniably fascinating.

At a certain point, he and Leela manage to get five microspans of time alone in the Rani’s TARIDS control room, and as soon as Leela lays hands on the controls her time sickness dissipates like fog burning off at midday. Her eyes glimmer with excitement and tears as she turns around and flings herself into his arms with such force that he staggers backward, nearly into the roundel-covered wall.

“It’s you,” she breathes into his ear, tremulous with emotion.

It’s the first time they’ve touched in years. Narvin isn’t a particularly needy person when it comes to physical contact – he’s perfectly content without it most of the time – but with Leela, he’s ravenous for her touch. He wraps his arms around her, with fervor enough to envelop her completely, if only his reach were wide enough. The urge to fashion his body into a shield, to protect her from any more harm during this hideous war, is overwhelming.

“Marry me,” he blurts out, as naturally and unprompted as a hiccup. Somewhere deep inside of him, a fragment of the Time Lord he used to be screams in surprise and horror. The rest of him is too caught up in this enchanted moment to bother listening.

Leela pulls back just far enough to stare up at his face, grinning at him. “Is this only because you have been pretending to be my husband for the last six weeks?”

“I’ve decided I rather like it,” he replies. “So … will you?”

“Is this supposed to be touching?” the Rani asks sharply, standing just inside the TARDIS doors, and executing a scathingly sarcastic clap. “Some sort of climactic reunion? You idiots were together in my lab five minutes ago, and here you are acting like you haven’t seen each other in ages. Irrational romantic dreck.”

She has a staser, of course. Narvin and Leela end up locked in cages at opposite ends of her science facility. It’s a week before they engineer an escape, but they also manage to send the science facility’s reactor core into meltdown and steal the Rani’s TARDIS as they leave, so all-in-all Narvin counts it as a win.

They stop by the moon full of Delmarkian refugees to bring supplies and an offer of escape to any who wish to hop aboard the TARDIS. As Narvin programs in the coordinates for Gallifrey, so they can finally return together to help Romana, Leela finally answers his question:

“I will marry you, Narvin. But only because of your big, beautiful flat, and your large CIA salary.”

He snorts, even as his chest fills with air and keeps right on inflating, like a balloon ready to pop with joy. "I have some bad news about the current state of my CIA pension, and the fact that the High Council has probably designated me a wanted man."

She steps around the time rotor, coming to stand beside him, bumping him with her hip. "Well then, I shall marry you because you are an outlaw. And because you are clever, and a good kisser." And with that, she reaches up and seizes hold of his head, and pulls him down to prove her point. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is dialogue from the Big Finish audio "War Doctor 4.2: The Lady of Obsidian."

**WAR DOCTOR 4.2: THE LADY OF OBSIDIAN**

**LEELA:** [Speaking of the battle at the Pillars of Consequence] We ended up among the Daleks, trying to kill them before they could kill us. There was a Dalek like no other that I had ever seen, grey and black and big, its top half like a glass ball.

 **WAR DOCTOR:** A disruptor Dalek, an early time weapon.

 **LEELA:** The glass ball was full of energy, going round and round, getting brighter. I fired at it just as it shot at me … it killed me, I thought.

 **WAR DOCTOR:** You were shot with an experimental time weapon.

 **LEELA:** I went into the dark. I was there for a long time … or seconds. I’m not sure.

 **WAR DOCTOR:** The disruptor Dalek displaced you in time and space, violently. It should have killed you.

 **LEELA:** I woke up on a world I did not know. There were kind people who helped me. They saw I was unwell, troubled. I hardly knew who I was.

 **ROSATA:** You’d lost your memory?

 **WAR DOCTOR:** No, I don’t think that’s it. Quite the opposite.

 **ROSATA:** What’s the opposite of losing your memory?

 **LEELA:** Gaining all of your memories.

 **WAR DOCTOR:** The disruptor Dalek weapon was intended to rip a person from history, entirely. From every possible timestream. It did half the job on Leela, it fractured her in each of her possible timelines, but she was reconstituted. You fought it, Leela. You refused to die.

 **LEELA:** I remember everything. Not just what I have done, but everything I may have done. Every possible choice. Every right decision, and every wrong one. Every consequence.

 **WAR DOCTOR:** And you don’t know which is true, do you? You don’t know which of these memories is your real life, and which are roads not taken.

 **LEELA:** My real life is buried, swamped by countless other lives.

... ... ... ... ...

 **LEELA:** I cannot be around people who know me. It hurts. I met one, he came to my world, a Gallifreyan. He said I had loved a man called Andred.

 **WAR DOCTOR:** A commander in the Chancellery Guard. You left me to marry him.

 **LEELA:** Stop! Please, stop! It hurts and confuses me. I cannot unravel the memories.

 **WAR DOCTOR:** Well, you _did_.

 **LEELA:** If I truly loved this Andred, it is no less a love than I remember for others, in other timelines, and they are all lost to me and feel just as real!

 **WAR DOCTOR:** You can’t shut yourself away

 **LEELA:** My life, the only life I know to be true, started two years ago. Daleks killed the kind strangers who had taken me in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all should listen to this audio, if nothing else just for Louise Jameson's performance in this scene. She is _incredible_ , every single thing about her delivery of this dialogue is flawless. What an absolute goddess tbh.


End file.
